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Something icy shivers through me.
“You’re referring to the fact that I was adopted as a child. And the answer is no, not really. I know who my family is.”
“But I’m talkin’ about your real family.”
My eyes narrow. “Generally speaking, Mr. Chinellato,” I growl, “I take great offense to anyone insinuating the people who raised me are in any way not my ‘real’ family.”
He rolls his eyes. “You know what the fuck I mean.”
“The answer is still no,” I grunt. “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
He smiles quietly. “You might want to start.”
I tense. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means?—”
The coffee cup right next to my hand suddenly explodes. A corner of the plastic picnic table we’re sitting at sublimates into plastic mist.
Oh FUCK.
“Roberto!” I roar, lunging across the table. “Get the fuck dow?—!”
Blood explodes from his mouth to splatter against my shirt and jacket. His eyes roll back, and just as I grab him to yank him to the ground, he goes limp.
...And blood begins flowing from a quarter-sized hole in his back as the prison alarms start to wail.
31
ELOISE
I scream when he walks through the door, his shirt covered in blood.
“It’s not mine,” Alistair instantly chokes out.
Before he can stop me, I slam into him, wrapping my arms around his body and holding him tight. Alistair’s muscled arms surround me as he buries his face in the crook of my neck.
“I’m sorry,” he hisses, hugging me tightly. “Christ, Eloise, I’m so fucking sorry for everything I said?—”
“No, I’m sorry,” I choke, twisting to kiss his face and lips over and over as tears pool in my eyes. “I’m sorry, and can we go straight to the part where we forget that stupid argument ever happened?”
He smiles, cupping my face and kissing me. “I had no right to attack you like that, or your father?—”
“It’s okay,” I choke, a tear sliding down my cheek before I kiss him again. I pull away, my hand flying to my mouth when I truly take in the sight of him. “What…”
“Roberto Chinellato,” he growls, unbuttoning his blood-soaked shirt and dropping it on the floor. “He was shot right in front of me in the yard at Fairview.”
“Oh my God!” I blurt. “Are you?—”
“I’m not hurt,” Alistair murmurs. He starts to pull my t-shirt over my head, and I realize it’s because I have blood all over me from hugging him.
He drops my bloodied shirt to the floor, and then he’s pulling me close, lifting me into his arms, and kissing me as he walks toward the shower.
“I just need you.”
I don’t love the idea of Alistair having dinner with Massimo. So I find myself pacing the suite after he leaves for Keens, chewing at my cuticles—a habit I seem to have picked up in the absence of drinking the last few days.
Since my marriage to Massimo, I’ve explained away the amount of drinking I do as “necessary”. Darkly, like self gallows-humor, I’ve jokingly referred to it as my “medicine”—something I need to get through even a single day living under Massimo’s reign of terror.
